Jenny Odell Saves (us from the thieves of) Time, part 1
How I connect this book to Robert MacFarlane’s “Underland”, and to my everyday life, too
Don’t let the title “Saving Time” mislead you. This is not a guide to becoming more productive, in the sense which business-oriented how-to books do. Not at all. It is an invitation to rediscover forgotten dimensions of time, ways of living it which we have lost from sight in the spinning treadmill of work and recovery to work more.
The book appears to be an uprising against nihilism, and a remedy for burnout. We live under growing pressure of time, but we are not doomed:
… neither our lives nor the life of our planet is a foregone conclusion.1
As the author declares in the introduction, we can save time. In return, time can, in the long term, save us. From the narrative, I interpret the action of saving time not in the sense of accumulating more of it, but rather as protecting an endangered species from extinction.
I am still in the middle of reading, but the book has already evoked a couple of ideas I would like to share. Firstly, thoughts after the chapters read, then a reference to another compelling volume I read a couple of years ago, and finally, about my attitude to time at work.
Perhaps I will write once more when I have finished. Please be patient, as I am a slow reader.
Half way reading “Saving Time”
The journey starts with a drive to the port of Oakland, through industrial areas and among the stacks of containers.
How do these steel receptacles relate to time? Containers have made the kind of the goods transported insignificant. Whatever waits inside the boxes, the trade deals with standardised transportation units, interchangeable between ships, trucks and railway wagons. Containers are fungible: handled in the same way, regardless of their content. They may carry the fruits of many people’s efforts, cookie-cutter parts, or pieces of unique craft work, but for a trader they are no more than TEUs: Twenty-foot Equivalent Units.
Time has undergone a similar process of packaging and standardisation. The container for time is a working hour. It is no more your or my time, a time of sweat in muscle strain, or time of brain racking. It is an hour we are paid for. The more stuff squeezed into a unit, the better. Time has become money.
Jenny Odell leads the reader through the history of equalling time with money. Some of the entrepreneurial inventions, like timetables, which defined every movement of an assembly worker with accuracy to a fraction of second, will go down in infamy comparable to slavery, I believe.
Nowadays, thanks to decades of advocacy for workers’ rights, most of us enjoy a decent rest time, every day, and once a week. Still, we struggle to establish the best possible work-life balance: allot as much time as it takes to not give up on the pursuit of goals at work, and snitch whatever time remains for social life, family, and recovery. What seems to be the two balanced ways we live our time, work and rest, the author of “Saving Time” puts in a perspective which shows them belonging to the same, horizontal line. This horizontal dimension of time goes in the history of ideas by the name of Chronos, the time measured by clocks, independent from the place where we are, inexorably flowing in one direction, callous to our needs and feelings. To achieve more, we switch between task incessantly, squeezed between the rock of demands and a hard place of our capacity. As long as we remain on this flat line of horizontal time, we cannot help yielding to its pressure. What we call leisure time, as long as measured by the same Chronos, and aimed to restore strength for more work, does not heal our burnout.
If the concept of leisure has any utility, for me it has to be this: an interruption, an apprehension, a glimpse both of the truth and of something completely different from what we normally see. This leisure is alien, not just to the world of work, but also to the habitual, everyday world.2
To experience this kind of leisure, we must transcend to another, qualitative rather than quantitative, vertical dimension of time, which corresponds with Greek Kairos: non-measurable time of critical, opportune moments. The first step to finding it is to ”put time back in its place.” Restore time where it had belonged before the modern western economy appropriated it.
Like the concept of time as money, the abstraction and separation of time and space is a culturally specific and fairly recent event in human history.3
In the restored, broader view, time is not an absolute, isolated physical phenomenon, it is not fungible. Every object: rocks that form the crust of our planet, ice, water, plants, animals, humans; every individual being, lives its own time. Many indigenous tribes draw the border between animate and inanimate objects differently than people in western, industrialised societies do. In their reckoning, only man made objects are inanimate, like furniture; while the elements of Nature have their own agency. Lands and seas, rivers and lakes, even rocks, live through their specific, geological time. In the most extreme conclusion, they deserve our respect as living beings.
At this moment, let me leave the pages of Jenny Odell’s “Saving time” and connect them to a thought from another book, by another author.
“Underland” by Robert MacFarlane
“Underland”, a fruit of the author’s seven years of research, travelling and writing, is an incredible journey into the worlds beneath out feet. Although the author guides a reader through hidden, hardly accessible places, the real field we finally explore is not a specific space, it is time. The real discovery after surfacing from the Underland is our relation to deep, geological time, which founded our emergence and will shape our future.
Deep time is a sharpening context for me. It says, look at the gift of being, now. Look at the astonishing responsibility of legacy-leaving. And look at what you’ve inherited in the wonder of this world. And what will our time leave?
Are we being good ancestors?4
Time is not a tool at our disposal, to “subdue and have dominion”.5 It is neither a commodity to buy. Time is an intrinsic dimension of every part of Nature. We are granted the invaluable gift of time to live in. To survive and thrive, we must find a harmony with it.
From the temporal dimension of the Universe to the pressure of the clock at everyday duties.
How do I cope with time at work?
In everyday life, we need to abide by the clock: to make appointments, to work together, to let know those who wait for the fruits of our work, when they can expect them ready.
I am lucky enough to deliver my work on time, although “meeting a deadline” has never been my top priority.
When a project is ready, sent to the manufacturer, then assembled, tested and commissioned, all these milestones are justified reasons to celebrate. Naturally, I am proud of many aspects of the work, but remain silent during loud boasts about the “delivery on time”. Surely, it is the effect of strenuous effort of the team, but not the less a considerable component of good luck for those who had planned the deadlines, often not being able to predict the real workload that the project would take, especially a prototypical one.
If you asked me where I put time in the hierarchy of my work, I would lay out it this way:
Work honestly. Don’t squander your time, nor the time of others (is this meeting necessary?) Be obsessed with quality, not with the calendar. To design well, it takes as much time as it takes.
Recently, I worked with two colleagues who helped me prepare loads of drawings from an extensive model. The type of structure was new for them, and so was the way to present it in drawings for the manufacturer and the installation team. It was an opportunity to show some methods, several software tricks, a couple of drawing enhancements. We talked, for half an hour to an hour every day, on the average, often digressing from the very subject of the drawings to similar solutions, to more general observations. Initially I felt a bit guilty of stealing working hours from the project’s budget, but the more work was done, the more I felt absolved, even reassured, and our meetings gradually needed to take less time. The focus on quality, not on speed, brought fruits. As we were revising every new portion of work every day, there was no need to check the whole bunch of drawings after they had been finished, apart from some final-cut look. We submitted the documentation on time, not having used the phrase “speed up” even once during about two months of work.
Will anyone recall these extended, but relevant discussions as moments of Kairos in the midst of workplace Chronos? An audacious hope, but I believe, not unsubstantiated.
The next chapter of “Saving Time”…
… changes our vision of time, from a limited, shrinking resource to a renewable we can grow. Let me invite to a reader’s reflection on this vision in one of the future posts.
I cannot promise I will reply to everyone, but your opinion can broaden my outlook and encourage further writing.
Complementary audio resources:
A conversation with Jenny Odell, Emergence Magazine:
or https://emergencemagazine.org/podcast/
Another conversation with with the author:
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso:
Robert Macfarlane “The Worlds Beneath Our Feet”. Conversation with Krista Tippet at On Being:
Jenny Odell, “Saving Time”, Introducion, p. XXX (Roman numeral 30)
Ibid., Chapter “Can there be leisure?”, p. 106
Ibid., Chapter “Putting time back in its place”, p. 128
“The Worlds Beneath Our Feet” Robert Macfarlane in conversation with Krista Tippet at On Being, https://onbeing.org/programs/robert-macfarlane-the-worlds-beneath-our-feet/
Compare The Bible, The Book of Genesis, 1:28